The Management Style of the Supreme Beings Read online

  Face it, bro, you just aren’t cut out for this line of work. Jay had this unfortunate streak of honesty. He claimed it came with the territory, though why he couldn’t sometimes be content with just being the Way and the Light, Kevin couldn’t say. The truth can be unkind, and surely kindness was more in line with the essence of the mission statement than mere factual accuracy. But if he was right … Well, was he? So far, Kevin’s record wasn’t impressive, he’d be the first to admit that. But maybe that was because they’d never given him a chance, never explained to him how things should be done. And besides, Jay would add at this point, we’re so rushed off our feet we simply haven’t got the time to show you. Quicker to do it ourselves. Quite.

  The soft buzzing noise was Uncle Ghost snoring. Kevin got up, went inside and fixed himself a coffee—just instant because when he’d tried to use the cappuccino machine something had gone wrong with it, and Dad hadn’t had time to mend it. He flicked on the TV, but it was just reruns of Touched by an Angel. I’d pray, Kevin said to himself, but who to?

  2

  Here’s a tricky one. How many drops of nitroglycerine, delivered by way of a standard laboratory pipette from a drop of sixteen feet, does it take to blow a three-foot-square hole in a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian basalt slab carved with bas-reliefs of Pharaoh doing obeisance to the Reinvigorated Sun, while doing as little collateral damage as possible?

  The answer, Jersey devoutly hoped, was four. That was all the nitro he had left, having used the rest of the bottle getting this far, and it’d be a confounded shame to have gone to so much trouble, and done so much irreversible damage to a designated World Heritage Site, only to wind up one drop short. In the event, he was proved right. At which he was so mightily relieved that he actually smiled.

  The echoes died away, gradually and with disconcerting echo effects. The acoustics in the basement of a pyramid are distinctly weird. Sound lingers, and just when you think you’ve heard the last of it, back it comes again, like audible stomach acid. Creepy like you wouldn’t believe, not to mention the risk of somebody outside hearing. That would be very bad. Naughty echo.

  His timetable allowed three minutes for the dust to settle. Over-optimistic. He couldn’t really see worth a damn and had his handkerchief tied over his nose as he dropped his rope ladder through the newly blasted hole in the floor, checked one last time that it was securely anchored and slowly began to climb down into the darkness.

  It had been a long day. To get this far, quite apart from the discomforts associated with setting off multiple explosions in a very confined space, he’d had to put up with a tiresome sequence of booby traps—walls that shifted and slabs that fell away when you trod on them, flights of poisoned arrows, razor-sharp pendulums and all manner of similar nonsense; how come, if ancient engineers could devise stuff like that, nobody had managed to come up with a functional flush toilet until 1778?—and his reserves of patience and energy were getting dangerously low. At this point he should be trembling with feverish anticipation, not fatigue. Somewhere in the gloom below him, if he’d got it right, was the secret he’d been searching for all his adult life, the greatest discovery in human history, the key to the last and greatest mystery of all. He should be feeling something, apart from a splitting headache and a dull pain in his chest which he unrealistically hoped wasn’t a cracked rib.

  After what felt like a lifetime his feet touched down on something level and solid. Taking one hand nervously off the rope ladder, he fished out his flashlight and flicked it on. Floor. Thank God for that. He shone the beam up. The hole in the roof was a very, very long way above him, and he was glad he’d taken the trouble to secure the ladder with four molybdenum steel crampons hammered into the living rock (twenty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents from eBay; he was on a budget, but the Chinese make good stuff these days).

  Well, he was here now; might as well get on with it. He shone the torch around the walls. An Egyptologist, or anyone whose aesthetic sense hadn’t been blunted down to nothing by a really miserable day blowing holes in walls and dodging sudden death, would’ve been stunned by the beauty of the frescoes, their colours as fresh and vibrant as the day they’d been painted, two thousand years before a bunch of shepherds gazed across an Italian hillside and one of them said, “I know, let’s call it Rome.” He yawned and muffled a sneeze. He knew what he was looking for, and it had to be here somewhere. Now then. If I was the most carefully hidden secret in the Universe, where would I be?

  “Dr. Thorpe.”

  He spun round so fast he nearly stumbled, just in time to see his rope ladder drop to the floor in a heap at his feet. He swung the flashlight up and picked out a face peering down at him through the hole in the roof. The face had a big moustache and was grinning.

  “Well done, Dr. Thorpe. We tried to warn you, but you just kept going.”

  “I might have guessed,” Jersey said bitterly. “You’re one of them. You’ve been on their side all along.”

  The man with the moustache grinned at him. “Of course,” he said. “You know me as Yusuf, a humble porter, but know that I am Constantine, two hundred and seventh Grand Master of the Guardians of the Secret. For a hundred and thirty-six generations my forefathers have striven to guard that which must never be revealed. Console yourself with the thought that nobody has ever come this close before, Dr. Thorpe. Be proud of it. Revel in that satisfaction until your dying day, which,” he added, “by my calculations will be Thursday. Or early Saturday morning if you remembered to bring sandwiches. Goodbye, Dr. Thorpe. I’d just like to say that I’ve enjoyed our little game of chess.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I won’t because my order values the truth above all things. Farewell.”

  Jersey stooped for something to throw. His hand closed around some small, heavy thing, but by the time he’d straightened up, the face had gone. He glanced at the object in his hand, recognised it as a priceless Eleventh Dynasty ushabti figurine, and threw it at the wall. “Constantine,” he roared, “your feet smell and your moustache looks ridiculous.” Echoes, then silence. Buggeration, he said to himself.

  Still, if he was right about the secret, it wouldn’t really matter terribly much. Everything now depended on how long the batteries in his flashlight lasted. He set about examining the walls inch by inch, his practised eye effortlessly translating the columns of hieroglyphs at sight. All sorts of guff about the imperishable glory of His late Majesty, and a load of gloomy though probably accurate predictions about what would happen to any unauthorised person who reached this spot; all well and good, but not what he was looking for. Boast, threat, boast, boast, threat, boast … Hello, what’s this?

  Suddenly the weariness and the ennui evaporated like spit on a griddle, and his heart started to pound. His hand shook as he fumbled for his notebook and pencil. Numbers, a string of hieroglyphic numerals. He leaned forward. The glow from his torch was yellowing as the batteries faded. Zero. Dear God, the first number was a zero.

  His hand was shaking so much, he broke his pencil. It took an agonising forty seconds to sharpen it. Zero. Followed by an eight. Then zero, zero.

  He could hardly breathe. An 0800 number. Could it really be true?

  He wrote down the remaining six digits like a man in a dream. By the time he’d finished, the torchlight was the dying glimmer of a faint amber sunset. He squinted at the numbers scrawled on the page, then slowly drew out his cellphone and keyed them in.

  The dialling tone. One ring. Two.

  Hello. All our lines are busy right now. Your call is being held in a queue until an operator is available. Your call is important to us. Please hold.

  He could hear music. It might have been a chorus of angels inside his head, but it was probably the phone playing Vivaldi. It didn’t matter. He was through.

  Please hold, the voice repeated. Like a man with his fingertips hooked over the threshold of Heaven, he held.

  3

  When Kevin spoke to him on the phone, he’d
assumed Uncle Nick was in his office. In fact, thanks to the miracle of cellular telephony, Uncle Nick, or Mr. Lucifer to his many subordinates, had taken the call on the thirteenth hole at Velvet Lawns, where he now spent a large proportion of his time. In his absence, the department was mostly run by Bernie Lachuk, his deputy assistant private secretary.

  Bernie—he hated Bernard, with the stress on the second syllable—was a civilian, a fact he was painfully aware of and rarely allowed to forget. He’d joined Flipside as part of a major rationalisation and downsizing exercise about thirty years ago (Bernie was still only twenty-six; we don’t need no steenkin’ sequential linear time), when a considerable number of the straightforward administrative functions had been outsourced to private contractors. That hadn’t worked out for a number of reasons, but Bernie and quite a few other civilians had stayed in post nevertheless. A lot of the older team members were still uncomfortable about working alongside mortals, but most of the logistical difficulties—toilets, temperature controls, doors, floors, etc.—had long since been ironed out, and even the diehards couldn’t deny that the Squishies (you weren’t supposed to call them that, but everybody did, including the mortals themselves) got the work done in half the time and at a fraction of the cost. As for the Squishies, by and large they found the working environment congenial, the work itself challenging but rewarding, and the pay a whisker on the lowish side of acceptable. Bernie, for example, had been a trainee supermarket manager before he came to work Flipside. It’s like I’d died and gone to Heaven, he told his mother at the end of his first week. Or something like that, he added quickly.

  Maybe he wasn’t quite so enthusiastic now. Mr. Lucifer, he suspected, tended to take advantage of him, and since he’d advanced as far up the hierarchy as a Squishy could get, the incentive to go the extra mile to accommodate his boss wasn’t quite as strong as it had been. Take this morning, for instance. Just mind the store for me, Mr. L. had said to him as he swept up his golf bag and stuck his brightly coloured cap on his head, I’ve got to go and shmooze a supplier. See you later, bye. Bernie wasn’t so sure about that. Mr. L. spent a lot of time shmoozing suppliers at the links or in restaurants and nightclubs, but the prices they paid for everyday consumables never seemed to go down; the opposite, in fact, and ten minutes research on the Net convinced Bernie that they could get an awful lot of the stuff considerably cheaper elsewhere, and without the need for a single golf ball to be inconvenienced or a single margarita consumed. He’d mentioned that, of course. Mr. L. had smiled at him and told him he didn’t understand How Things Worked. Fair enough. It was Mr. L.’s train set, after all.

  Another concept Mr. L. seemed to have trouble with, probably because of the sequential linear time thing, was normal working hours and overtime. Minding the store, for example, seemed to Bernie to constitute days, weeks, sometimes months of frantic activity (but when you’re rushed off your feet you don’t notice the passage of time particularly, so that was all right), for which he received no additional payment and which didn’t leave him much scope for a personal life. He understood, of course. He was mortal, Mr. L. wasn’t. Naturally the boss had trouble seeing things from his perspective, just as a bird doesn’t find it easy to understand a fish. And someone had to do keep the place ticking over, and yes, he did want to keep this job, so …

  Quite. And yet.

  One of the phones—the green one, which always meant trouble—rang, and he grabbed it without looking up from the figures on his screen. “Lachuk.”

  “This is Malephar.” Oh dear. “Number Six furnace is down again. Get me Maintenance.”

  Malephar was a Duke of Hell, had been ever since the Fall. He didn’t like Squishies very much. He was also terrible at his job, but it wasn’t Bernie’s place to criticise. “I’ll get on to it straight away, Mr. Malephar, but they told me this morning they’re running just a bit behind on non-essentials, so it might not be today. Sorry for any—”

  “Don’t give me that. I want them here, now. Got that?”

  Or there’d be Hell to pay (acting senior payroll clerk, B. Lachuk). “Yes, Mr. Malephar, I’ll see what I can do. Thank you for—”

  The line went dead. He put the phone down, counted to ten under his breath and picked it up again. “Hello, this is Bernie Lachuk, front office. Could I possibly speak to—?”

  “Wait.”

  You could never entirely forget where you were and who you were dealing with: a certain something in the way they spoke to you. “Sure,” Bernie said. “I’ll hold.”

  A long, long time later a voice said, “Now what?”

  “I’ve just had a call from Duke Malephar. Apparently Number Six is playing up again. He wonders if you could possibly see your way to—”

  “Impossible.” He recognised the voice. Awkwardness lay ahead, because although Malephar was Head of Operations, which theoretically took precedence over Maintenance, Balam, the Clerk of the Works, was a King and outranked Malephar by two clear pay grades. In real terms, of course, Bernie was acting boss of them all and they had to do what he told them to; the skill, of course, lay in the telling. “I’ve got requisitions backed up to infinity and half my demons are off sick. Tell the old goat to fix it himself.”

  Strictly speaking, there was only one old goat in the Department, and he was off playing golf. “I can certainly pass your message along,” Bernie said, “but you might care to consider—”

  “What?”

  “Well, I was just thinking,” Bernie said meekly. “Naturally, if you’ve got other, more pressing jobs on the list, then that’s absolutely fine. But it occurs to me, if the furnace is offline for very long, it’ll cool down and the lining will crack, and obviously that wouldn’t be your fault, but you know how unreasonable some people can be, naming no names, so maybe if you could see your way to—oh, I don’t know …” He called up the maintenance duty rosters on his screen, took in all the relevant information at a single practised glance and did the mental juggle. “Hey, here’s a thought. How’d it be if you reassigned Blue Team from repainting the lines on the tennis courts to plumbing that leak in the brimstone vats, which would free up Purple Team to handle the low gas pressure problem, which means you could have Red Team go take a look at Furnace Six? Just a suggestion,” he added quickly. “You know the maintenance business a heck of a lot better than I do, but—”

  “Just a moment. Don’t talk so damn fast. All right, Green Team to the brimstone vats.”

  “Um, Blue.”

  “Say what?”

  “Blue Team to the vats,” Bernie said patiently. “Purple on the gas, leaving Red free to deal with Furnace Six. Green, I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, is currently mucking out the perjurors on Level Five, so maybe it wouldn’t be the best possible idea to—”

  “God, no. All right,” the King growled, “we’ll do it your way. Just tell that jackass he owes me, all right?”

  “I’ll pass the message on,” Bernie lied. “Thank you, Mr. Balam. Have a nice day, now.”

  He replaced the phone, slumped back in his chair and took half a dozen deep breaths. Another crisis averted. Well, that was what he was there for, and they weren’t such bad fellows really, once you got to know them. But wouldn’t it be nice if, just once, he could get all the section heads singing from the same hymn sheet? Or something.

  This time it was the red phone. He swapped back to the screen he’d been working on earlier and picked it up. “Lachuk.”

  “Hi, kid. Everything under control?”

  “Yes, Mr. Lucifer. No problems at all.”

  “That’s the boy. Sorry, looks like I won’t be through here as early as I’d hoped. The supplier wants to go out to dinner after the game, maybe take in a show later. You can cope, can’t you?”

  “I’ll do my best, Mr. Lucifer.”

  “Great stuff. Oh, and I might be in a tad late in the morning. Got a few errands to run on my way to the office.”

  “No worries, Mr. Lucifer. Just leave everything to me.”<
br />
  “Good boy. Bye now.”

  His observations over the past thirty years had led him to conclude that they didn’t do irony. Sarcasm, yes, they were very good at that, but the milder, more subtle isotope seemed to go right over their heads like a flock of migrating geese. Probably just as well. He sighed. In theory there was a night shift and a night duty manager he could hand over to at midnight, but the night duty manager was Prince Sitri, who had better things to do of an evening than sit around in an office taking flak from a bunch of bureaucrats, and since he was Mr. L.’s nephew, there wasn’t an awful lot that could be done about it. He pressed the intercom. “Jenny? Get me catering.”

  He quite liked Jenny. If you didn’t know better, you could take her for a Squishy. She wasn’t, in fact; she was something Prince Sitri had conjured up about seven hundred years ago to tempt a particularly stern hermit who lived on top of a stone pillar in the desert. Her function fulfilled, the Prince had neglected to unconjure her, and she’d drifted about the place looking lost ever since, until Bernie had suggested she might like to try her hand at running the switchboard. It turned out she was good at that, not to mention pathetically grateful to have something to do. “Catering. Eligos speaking.”

  That was all right. Eligos was one of the good guys, figuratively speaking, a Duke of Hell who didn’t mind rolling up his sleeves and getting his claws dirty. “Hi, this is Bernie Lachuk, front office. Do you suppose you could send a couple of cheese rolls and a flask of coffee up here some time?”